11 The Programmer’s View

One aim of the current message catalog implementation provided by
GNU gettext was to use the system’s message catalog handling, if the
installer wishes to do so. So we perhaps should first take a look at
the solutions we know about. The people in the POSIX committee did not
manage to agree on one of the semi-official standards which we’ll
describe below. In fact they couldn’t agree on anything, so they decided
only to include an example of an interface. The major Unix vendors
are split in the usage of the two most important specifications: X/Open’s
catgets vs. Uniforum’s gettext interface. We’ll describe them both and
later explain our solution of this dilemma.